Existing U.S. law and treaty obligations should have prevented many of the abuses and mistakes made during this program. While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured. I also believe that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading. I believe the evidence of this is overwhelming and incontrovertible.

According to the Report, the CIA deceived policymakers in Congress and the White House, as well Justice Department investigators, about detention conditions and methods. Additionally, the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs released “inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness” of the program; contrary to its goals, the torture program “in some cases, impeded the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.” Many of the officers that were involved in the program “had serious documented personal and professional problems — including histories of violence and records of abusive treatment of others.” Though the CIA held around 100 detainees at a given time, the agency didn’t have accurate figures for the number of detainees in custody.

The campaign to defend the program was extensive. One section of the report is dedicated to debunking the eight most commonly cited examples of “success stories.” In each of them, the role that enhanced interrogations played in thwarting attacks was misrepresented and often fabricated. For instance, the CIA frequently suggested that information gained during interrogations prevented attacks on Heathrow Airport in 2003. But the Al-Qaeda members charged with carrying out the attack (Ammar Al-Baluchi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and others) were already in detention as of early 2003. Even under torture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided speculative and inaccurate answers to his interrogators about the Heathrow operation. Only “after being confronted by contradictory evidence” did he provide the name of a key accomplice.

The Report makes it clear that the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was, in every sense, a moral and strategic catastrophe.

2.Mohamedou Ould Slahi’sGuantánamo Diary provides an intimate glimpse into the early years of the program. Slahi has been in CIA detention for almost 14 years, from the earliest years of the War on Terror, but has never been tried for a crime. His story implicates a number of foreign governments and corroborates many of the findings of the Torture Report: improperly supervised and often sadistic officers, undisciplined interrogation tactics, and the obstruction of the International Red Cross and other watchdog groups.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was born in Mauritania; he writes wryly about his home country: “In Mauritania, people fix everything. In Germany, they replace everything.” He describes wedding rituals and the sloppy work of mukhabarat, Arab-country secret police, who “are more well-known to the commoners” and “should think about a new nomenclature, something like ‘The Most Obvious Police.’” He describes a Mauritanian ritual in which the bride is “kidnapped” by her friends and the groom must go in search of her; it sometimes takes days but eventually the two spouses are joyously reunited.

In the early 1990s, he interrupted his studies in Germany to fight in Afghanistan. He swore allegiance to Al-Qaeda, which had not yet declared war on the United States. Over the next 12 years, Slahi worked in Germany and Canada, and distanced himself from militant Islam. At times, he came into contact with fellow mujahadeen, including fighters in transit to Chechnya. Slahi also had family connections to a high-level Al-Qaeda leader who opposed the 9/11 attacks and later defected; he wired money on his behalf to the leader’s family. (That leader lives unbothered in Mauritania.) In Canada, he attended the same mosque as attempted LAX bomber, Ahmed Ressam. Evidently, the interactions were at most brief and not incriminating; according to Canadian intelligence, Ressam and Slahi may never have met.

By 2000, he had settled in Nouakchott, Mauritania. After 9/11, he was detained by his own government. At the time of his arrest, “the Mauritanian President was hanging onto office by a spider’s thread,” which made him both reluctant to deny the U.S.’s request for Slahi and reluctant to hand over a Mauritanian citizen too readily. In mid-November 2001, Slahi was arrested and handed over to American authorities. He was flown to Amman, where he was tortured brutally by Jordanian intelligence, then Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and finally Guantanámo. He began writing the diary in 2005. His lawyers spent years attempting to get the diary declassified.

Slahi learned English during his detention. But his prose is shot through with moving pathos and beauty: “All I know is that one detainee sat on my right, and one on my left, and another against my back. It is always good to feel the warmth of your co-detainees, somehow it’s solacing.” Later, he writes, “I hate small planes. I always feel I’m on the wing of a demon when I travel in them.”

Slahi’s voice is complex, wry, perceptive. During an interrogation, Slahi said, “I even think his whole [9/11] story was a fake, to unlock the terrorism budget and hurt the Muslims.” He reflected on his statement later, “Back then I didn’t know a whole lot of things that I do now. I believed excessively in Conspiracy Theories — though maybe not as much as the U.S. government does.”

Slahi observes the changes in Guantanámo as tactics are introduced, changed, and discarded. Early in his detention, female CIA agents sexually molested him. One agent says, “I’ve always been successful. Having sex with someone is not considered torture.” (The use of these methods by CIA agents is confirmed in the Schmidt-Furlow report.)

Later, the interrogators craft forgeries — passports and letters from his family — but the forgeries are awkward, riddled with mistakes, and transparent. When Slahi points out that a fake U.S. passport with Slahi’s name on it doesn’t prove anything (since the U.S. government could easily create one), the interrogator never mentions it again.

To further illustrate how long-term detention fails to reach its goals, the detainees become more practiced in the techniques than their interrogators. Many of them begin to sign false confessions to earn basic rights. Slahi is awarded a DVD player and television for incriminating himself. Slahi observes that some of the interrogators are decent people following orders, and others are pathological sadists. He writes about an interrogator, “You could see that he had been doing this work for some time: there were no signs of humanity in his face. He hated himself more than anybody could hate him.”

The text is heavily redacted. Offering further testimony to the incompetence of his captors, the redactions are clumsy, tone-deaf, and poorly weighed. Details about a female interrogator and the pronoun “she” is deleted but it’s easy to infer from the rest of the text. “Gamal Abdel Nasser,” despite his death over 40 years ago, is obscured, presumably because the redactor didn’t recognize the name of the most seminal Arab leader of the 20th century.

The handwritten pages that are interspersed throughout the book have the chastening effect of authenticity. The pages are blotted with excisions that create a literal void, the names, details, and locations that are still classified. They also come to represent a more pervasive void: an incomplete reckoning with the unconscionable policies performed in the name of American citizens.

3.
The first conclusion of the Torture Report is: “#1: The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” The report goes on to point out that torture often led to fabrications about “critical intelligence issues.”

The government had to adduce evidence — which is different from intelligence — showing that it was more likely than not that Salahi was a part of al-Qaida. To do so, it had to show that the support Salahi undoubtedly did provide from time to time was provided within al-Qaida’s command structure. The government has not done so. (sic)

He continues, “The government’s problem is that its proof that Salahi gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution.”

The writ has not been executed. In September 2010, a Circuit Court found that the court left “unresolved key factual questions necessary for us to determine as a matter of law whether Salahi was ‘part of’ al-Qaida when captured.” They vacated Robertson’s decision and “remanded [Slahi’s case] for further proceedings.”

On its face, The Marriage Plot appears to be a novel that mentions a lot of novels without talking about any of them. These facile, knowing references disguise the sly ways that this novel engages with its predecessors.

In the last few months, Alaska has been brutal to people I know. A friend who’s so knowledgeable about the wilderness he teaches college classes on the subject got mauled by a bear on a mountain outside Haines. The outdoors-savvy boyfriend of a friend disappeared while running or hiking outside Nome. A bush pilot I flew with last year crashed into Admiralty Island; he and all but one of the passengers died.

But if Alaska can be brutal, it can also be transcendent. Another friend recently caught a beautiful king salmon with a fly she tied herself; the photo of her holding it conveys a form of worship. Earlier this summer, I traveled to Admiralty Island — Kootznoowoo, or “fortress of the bears” in Lingít, the indigenous language of the area. For hours, we watched male and female brown bears court — running away, snarling, following each other as if they were connected by an ever-shortening rope. For the last few years, my boyfriend and I have packed inflatable boats, food, and our tent and floated down a different river in Alaska or the Yukon — the Pelly, the Big Salmon, the Nisutlin, the Stikine. We’ve listened to a dozen wolves howl and bark on each side of the river around us long into the night. We’ve watched a pack of them ghost in and out of the trees, barely visible as they run. We’ve seen kingfishers beat in place above the water, ravens chase ospreys, a cow moose sheltering her two calves as she watched us float by, black and brown bears eating sedges.

Many fiction writers get wilderness wrong.

I recently received a copy of Dave Eggers’s newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, which is set in Alaska. I like Eggers’s books. I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in high school, when my love for it verged on the babbling. I appreciate the generous, expansive nature of his writing, and because he’s Dave Eggers, I really enjoyed everything about the new book that relates to people. Josie, the protagonist, is complicated, believable, moving, frequently hilarious — so is the way she interacts with others. The towns, and their quirky, touristy craziness, ring true.

This is not the case for the wilderness. At one point in the book, Josie watches a water snake emerge from a river and eat a snail. The only problem? There are no snakes in Alaska. In a later section, Josie and her two children pause to watch “a ten point buck.” Only problem? There are no “ten point bucks” in interior Alaska. Every now and then mule deer stray over from Canada, but when they do they’re so unusual people write newspaper articles about them. A “ten-point buck?” No.

In the first ten pages, Josie and the kids drive through an animal park that advertises its Alaskan mammals. They see “a pair of moose, and their new calf, none of them stirring.” I realize this is a zoo, but male moose do not hang around with their calves. They saw “an antelope, spindly and stupid; it walked a few feet before stopping to look forlornly into the grey mountains beyond. Its eyes said, Take me, Lord. I am now broken.” Again, a zoo, but there are no antelope in Alaska. If it wanted to flee into the Alaskan mountains it would find itself just as lonely and would die of cold, wolves, or starvation come winter. When they’re finished with the zoo, a ranger points “to a mountain range nearby, where, he said, there was a rare thing: a small group of bighorn sheep, cutting a horizontal line across the ridge, east to west.” Bighorn sheep do not live in Alaska. Alaska has Dall sheep, which are a different species.

To most Alaskans, these are big mistakes. But when reading Heroes of the Frontier, I was also thinking about something more intangible — the nature of a place versus the nature of a story set in that place.

Much of the novel is set on the road, but at the end Josie and her two children, Paul and Ana, decide to go for a hike. It ends up taking much longer than they anticipated, and they’re unprepared. There is lightning. It begins to rain; they get soaked. They decide not to go back the way they’ve come, but to run from copse of trees to copse of trees, somehow staying on the trail. If there’s one thing indicated by the very large number of people that get lost and die or have to be rescued in the Alaskan wilderness every year, it’s that it is very easy to accidentally veer off-trail, especially if the trail is not well traveled or near a city, especially if it’s not the best of circumstances. But somehow, despite the fact that they’re literally running for their lives during a massive storm, Josie and the kids keep finding clues as to where they’re going.

There’s something described as “an avalanche,” though its only elements seem to be rock and shale — Josie slides across it on her back with her upper body clad in only a bra, but Eggers never mentions snow, ice or cold. Somehow, Josie and her children make it to a cabin she didn’t realize was there when they began the hike. It is decked out with balloons and a feast for the “Stromberg Family Reunion.” I can get with a cabin; a cabin can be the deus ex machina of real-life salvation. But a cabin decorated and then abandoned, miles and an arduous hike into the wilderness, containing a table “overflowing with juices and sodas, chips, fruit and a glorious chocolate cake under a plastic canopy?” I wanted to believe in this cabin — I hope there is a cabin like that out there for all of us — but I could think of too many people for whom this cabin didn’t exist.

I am by no means immune to the perils of writing wilderness myself. I recently showed a new chapter in my novel-in-revision to my boyfriend Bjorn, a life-long Alaskan. In it, a young girl wanders around lost on Chichagof Island. It was the chapter he liked least.

“She would be afraid,” he said. “When does she start feeling like prey?”

My problem was that I wanted my character to be challenged, but like Eggers, I hadn’t accounted for the reality of the place that would challenge her.

A few years ago, Bjorn and I hiked the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail, the route many would-be miners took to the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. It was before the official start of the season, and except for a very fit German guy in his mid-twenties, we were the only hikers. We spent the first night at Sheep Camp, the last stop before the pass; the German guy woke before us, and we followed his tracks the rest of the day. We summited the pass in a late-May snowstorm on steps Bjorn cut with his ice ax and emerged from the clouds into what a Canadian ranger we’d passed called “a bluebird day.” It was surreal. We were still using our snowshoes, but bumblebees buzzed around us and landed on the snow. We started steaming. We followed the route the snowshoe-wearing rangers had flagged…right over a half-frozen pond. The German guy hadn’t brought snowshoes, and we could see the hole where he’d fallen through up to his waist, the drag marks where he’d pulled himself out. As we walked, we saw his footsteps — he’d been post-holing, sinking through the deep snow up to his crotch with each step. Post-holing makes for incredibly miserable walking. A few miles later, we saw a tiny figure waving to us frantically. The German guy hadn’t brought sunglasses, and his eyes were hurting; he was going snow-blind. Bjorn gave him an extra pair. The rangers had told him they’d marked the trail to Happy Camp, and he was wondering if he’d taken a wrong turn. We got out our GPS and figured out we were on the snow-covered trail, but the rangers had stopped flagging two or three miles short.

That is what happens in wilderness when you are unprepared — even with a flagged route on a trail thousands have walked before, even if you are experienced. You don’t magically find a party-food-filled abandoned cabin decorated for a family reunion, complete with a sheet cake under a protective dome. You end up miserable and wet and exhausted and snow-blind and far from where you’ve tried to be, and if you’re lucky, it’s a sunny day and there are other people around who can help you. It’s a transformative experience to realize how vulnerable, and how lucky, you are.

The idea of owing more to luck than courage, however, contradicts one of the basic themes of Heroes of the Frontier — that through acting bravely and persevering, you and those around you (in Josie’s case, Paul and Ana) can become the “heroes” of the title. That conflict is one of the difficulties of writing wilderness in fiction. Wilderness is what it is, not what a book requires it to be. The Alaskan wilderness challenges people in ways they don’t anticipate, and it is not kind to the inexperienced and underprepared, no matter how “brave” they might be.

Last year, I went to a panel in which Juneau writer Ernestine Hayes, author of Blonde Indian, said “A sense of place arises from the place itself… it is (not) a panorama to be conquered.” I thought of this as I read these lines, after Josie and company arrive at the cabin: “Every part of their being was awake. Their minds were screaming in triumph, their arms and legs wanted more challenge, more conquest, more glory.” At the end of Heroes of the Frontier, Alaska is a panorama conquered.

Ultimately, the novel is about a woman escaping the fears, restrictions and regrets of her life and trying to shape her children into good, brave people, like those she imagines live in Alaska. It’s an admirable goal. But both in towns and out of them, Josie, Paul and Ana seem charmed. In the wild, that means Eggers’s Alaska loses something essential to itself.

So here are some questions. Where is the line between artistic license and error? If we take liberties with the character of a place and we are aware of it, should we acknowledge that we’ve done so? This isn’t nonfiction, after all, and in spite of its bighorn sheep, Heroes of the Frontier is an enjoyable story.

Writers who write wilderness have a responsibility to it, partly because so many of us are disconnected from it, and partly because it’s been misrepresented so often. We’ve now constructed so much of the world — even in our national parks — that most of us never experience real wilderness, a place you can’t see from the road. It exists with or without us. It means only and incredibly itself, and when we are there, we become a part of it — something that can be terrifying, or exhilarating, or both.

There is lots of insightful, beautiful writing about Alaskan and northern wilderness, both fiction and nonfiction — see Seth Kantner, Sherry Simpson, Velma Wallis, a vast array of others. There are people who write wilderness gorgeously outside the context of Alaska as well — Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy. If there’s anything wilderness can teach you, it’s the dizzying breadth of what you do not know, and if what you write is to resonate as true there is no lesson more important. So if you’re going to write wilderness, experience it. Respect it. Be prepared and scared and awestruck and relieved. Research. Fact check. Then represent the place you are writing as honestly as you can. You owe it to a world that has lost a sense of true wild.

If works of art were about something, instead of existing self-sufficiently for themselves, this is what Lerner's work would be about: the chasm between a life lived and a thing made; the discouragement one suffers when trying to find one in the other.

The first thing I broke was the cream-colored ceramic sugar bowl. Smashed to bits. I’d been at my friend’s flat in London for less than a day, and left to my own devices, I innocently placed a cup in the dish rack, and like a collapsing house of cards, the contents of the rack began to shift, and through an unnoticed gap in the front of the rack, the sugar bowl escaped and smashed onto the floor. My first-day settling-in disaster.

But I wasn’t done. My destruction cut a path from the kitchen to the bathroom where I didn’t fully comprehend that the shower fixture didn’t want to turn the way I wanted it to turn, and with superhuman strength, I bent it, rendering it unusable. It took hours, and a toolbox, for me to fix it.

Then it was on to the den – my bedroom for the visit – where I thought I’d broken the TV. I’d switched it off with the remote, and no amount of maniacal and increasingly haphazard button-pressing would turn it on again. (It took my friend all of two seconds to locate the on/off button on the side of the set – a button that I swear wasn’t there earlier – and bring the BBC back into our world.)

Then back to the kitchen a few days later where I desperately tried to open the clothes-dryer door after the cycle had ended, unaware that the door would not, could not, open until a full minute had passed. A minute filled with thoughts of wrenches and hammers and whatever I may require to force open the door and rescue my clothes.

That’s me, staying with a friend for two weeks in London, a city I’m somewhat familiar with, in a country whose language I share.

So Philip Graham and his family can be excused for their “first-day settling-in disasters” at the start of their year in Portugal, alone in a Lisbon apartment struggling with the flat’s lighting system. Dispatches, detailing their disasters – and triumphs – previously appeared in McSweeney’s online, and now the wonderful collected memoir of the Graham family’s year in Portugal The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon is available in print.

In 2006, author and teacher Philip Graham uprooted his family – his anthropologist wife Alma and their 12-year-old daughter Hannah – and transplanted them to Lisbon. Reading the dispatches, I felt as if I were with this family every step of the way, through every day-to-day adventure and every settling-in disaster, as they walked that fine line between fitting in and remaining on the outside.

“I do and I don’t feel at home here,” Graham writes. “I oscillate between comfort and unease.”

Language of course is a big barrier and while the whole family does its best to learn and communicate in Portuguese, it proves to be a challenge.

“There’s so much to remember in building a Portuguese sentence,” Graham writes, leading in to an account of a morning reading of a Portuguese newspaper, and how a single word – andar (to walk) – can be used in so many different ways. “One lousy verb, so many subgestures.”

A recurring theme in Graham’s book is “Saudade,” a complex emotion “that combines sorrow, longing and regret, laced perhaps with a little mournful pleasure.” Saudade colors all aspects of Portuguese life – from its fado music to its soccer matches to its underdog sensibility.

This being a family memoir, food and drink naturally have a strong presence and the wines and fish and other delicacies linger on the tip of the reader’s tongue. When I finished reading The Moon, Come to Earth, I asked my parents – who had spent a few days in Lisbon some years ago – what image lingered the most. Without missing a beat, my mother replied “the grilled sardines.”

Here is the opening phrase of the opening line of the opening dispatch in Philip Graham’s book: “The grilled sardines, lying in my plate…”

The Moon, Come to Earth lifted me up from my humdrum life and transplanted me into the Graham family’s Lisbon adventure. It was a day-to-day adventure, full of the familiar, full of new routines and small struggles. It was a bit sad to leave it all, a bit of saudade creeping into my own life.

A week or so after reading it, I was in London, wreaking havoc in the flat, and trying to make the unfamiliar familiar. Fighting the good fight. And delighting in the small triumphs.